Abstract
Street names (odonyms) play an important role not only as descriptors of geographic locations but also due to their sociological and political connotations and commemorative character. Here we analyse street names in Europe and North America extracted from OpenStreetMap, asking in particular to what extent odonyms reflect early European settlements in the New World, i.e., the immigration of German, Austrian and Scandinavian minorities. We observe that old street names of European origin can predominantly be found in rural areas. North American street names indeed recapitulate local and regional settlement histories. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that easily accessible data sets from freely available map data such as street names convey usable information concerning migration patterns and the history of settlements in the case of European immigrants in North America as well as colonial history. We provide a freely available pipeline to analyse this kind of data.
Highlights
The history of North America is in large parts driven by huge migration waves
Street names have been extracted filtering the data by the tag highway, which defines the category of all types of streets in OSM
We identify regions in North America by plotting the density of street names with common
Summary
After the arrival of the first Europeans, settlements, cities, and states were created and developed based on cultures, religions and national identities of their founders. Woodard [1] describes in great detail how groups of early settlers formed several societies centered around various principles and beliefs. These groups developed the “dominant cultures” and shaped the basis for the “eleven American nations” that can still be found today and are responsible for the difficulties of making the United States a unified nation based on common concepts and values [1,2]. Three large immigration waves from mostly Europe to the North American continent can be identified between 1830 and 1924 [1]. The first wave between 1830 and 1860 bringing mainly Irish, German and British people was followed by the second and even larger wave until 1890 where people from the afore-mentioned countries together with Scandinavians and Chinese arrived at the east coast
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